The many faces of Doug Jones

Doug Jones: A thousand faces, his own unknown

Actor Doug Jones has his Abe Sapien makeup put on by Thom Floutz for "Hellboy II: The Golden Army." Jones relies on such people to get him through long, punishing shoots, noting, "My makeup people get very close with me."
Contributed photo / Helen Chavez

For someone whose mug rarely graces the big screen, actor Doug Jones has carved out a nice career under wraps and become a bit of a cult favorite.

He's played a blue-headed fish mutant with big black glasses, ghastly horror creatures with gangly horns and eyes lodged in their palms, a sleek Silver Surfer action figure in a Fantastic Four film, a McDonald's pitch man with a crescent moon for a head, and a cartoonish version of a French pop star. His next movie monster might be Frankenstein.

In a business where face time is everything, Jones has spent large chunks of his cinematic life under heavy makeup, prosthetics and costumes.

"I've been an actor for 25 years now," he said in a recent interview, "and I went about 20 of those with no one knowing who I am."

Jones figures to show his real face Wednesday night when he comes to California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks to talk about his craft as part of the "Conversations With ..." actor speaker series started and hosted by professor Markus Flanagan.

Flanagan, a fellow actor who has known Jones for years, said of him, "He's as light and fun and silly and caring as they come. He doesn't fit the mold — a lot of actors are competitive and brooding. In the early days, I didn't think he was going to make it."

Flanagan is looking forward to chatting with Jones, especially on the heels of what he termed the "overwhelming response" to last month's series debut with actor Jack McGee.

Jones is a guy who measures the toughness of some jobs by how many hours he spends in makeup, every working day, before he ever steps in front of the camera.

"If you are impatient, fidgety or claustrophobic, this might not be the career for you," he said with a laugh.

Different worlds

The 50-year-old Indiana native said he likes the anonymity.

He plays characters people will come to know "and the next day, I'll be at Starbucks and no one has a clue who I am," noted Jones, who has resided in Santa Clarita for more than 20 years.

"I've really enjoyed not having people live in the bushes outside my home," he joked.

The one realm where Jones is well-known is the comic book, horror and sci-fi conventions, the Comic-Cons of the world, where many of his characters originated.

Such fans are rabid and intensely devoted to details, so they know Jones. He's booked at a slew of such conventions around the country into 2012.

He signs photos of characters he's played. He has also signed iPhones, laptops and the occasional woman's cleavage. But the most unusual requests come from the fans who hand him their cellphones asking him to leave a message in their friend's box — in the voice of one of his characters, of course.

"I'm fun-hearted about all that," he said. "It's all for the fans."

Their interest grew in recent years with a string of iconic characters: the fish-man mutant Abe Sapien from the 2004 film "Hellboy," a role Jones reprised in a 2008 sequel; the faun and pale man characters in 2006's "Pan's Labyrinth"; and the title character from the 2007 movie "4: Rise of the Silver Surfer."

Frankenstein would raise his profile. That film would team him with celebrated Mexican director Guillermo del Toro for the fifth time, a list that includes "Pan's Labyrinth" and the two "Hellboy" movies.

Del Toro, Jones said, has long dreamed of doing a Frankenstein film. Nothing is finalized, but Jones said he's attached to the project verbally and reportedly already has tested makeup for it.

He called working with del Toro like collaborating with a friend and being "in the hands of a genius."

"Now mind you," Jones said, "his movies have put me through more hell than any others in my career."

Beneath mountains of makeup and gear

The two "Pan's Labyrinth" characters each took five hours of makeup daily, Jones said; Abe Sapien took seven hours each day.

It's not easy being under wraps. On the 2002 film "The Time Machine" (where he played a spy Morlock), Jones recalled seeing stunt men who couldn't handle the heavy costumes, yelling "get it off me."

He's never had a problem with claustrophobia. But under all that stuff, Jones almost always has issues.

"You can't see, or walk straight," he said. "You can't hear very well. Your senses are all numbed. You are carrying much more weight. There's more heat in there."

He needs help. Said Jones: "My makeup artists are my nursemaids, all day."

A close comparison might be a bomb squad member, football player or hockey goaltender. Jones tries to stay fit and said that he thinks like an athlete as well as an actor.

"Not only must you act, but it's also an endurance test," he said.

It helps that he has the build of a 1-iron or a fish stick (the latter is an actual nickname del Toro gave him). Jones is 6 feet, 3 ½ inches tall and weighs in at 140 pounds.

"Do the math," he noted, "and that's one very skinny guy."

Jones also is a mime and a contortionist — he can put his legs behind his head. The two skills aid the physicality of his craft.

Mime, he noted, "has opened up my body from the neck down. There's dialogue that comes from your mouth, and a kind of dialogue that you impart with your body."

Playing Abe Sapien in "Hellboy," he noted, presented a challenge to give the character a physical life. He didn't have much to draw upon.

So he studied the movements of goldfish in his office tank. He observed how they glided in water, how the heads would dart inquisitively but the rest of their bodies flowed fluidly and stayed calm. "And I said to myself, 'That's Abe Sapien,'" Jones recalled.

He took those mannerisms to the set. On one of the first days, del Toro noticed him doing the goldfish-inspired movements.

Jones has been in one costume or another for about three decades. At Ball State University, where he majored in telecommunications, minored in theater and performed with the troupe Mime Over Matter, Jones also donned the school's mascot, Charlie the Cardinal, for basketball games and the like.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1985, one of his first gigs was as the jazzy Mac Tonight mascot in the McDonald's ads touting its late-night drive-thru menu. Jones appeared in costume in 27 such ads in the 1980s and 1990s, sporting Mac Tonight's signature crescent-moon head, suit and dark glasses.

"That locked me in as the tall, goofy, skinny guy who moves well and doesn't complain much," he cracked.

Jones also has applied his willowy talents to music videos for acts ranging from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Marilyn Manson.

For Madonna's arty "Bedtime Story," Jones had a cameo as a man sitting on a bench in a smoking jacket, his head replaced by a hand mirror with Madonna's face on it.

"It's not me in that video as much as it's my body," Jones noted.

He's used to that by now.

Coming up

Jones has played normal characters, showing a human face, in films such as "Adaptation" and "My Name Is Jerry."

The latter, filmed with fellow Ball State alums at the school's Muncie, Ind., campus, just hit Netflix and is his personal favorite of the human characters he's played; he won a best actor award at the Strasbourg International Film Festival for it.

Jones next will be seen in the Internet-only series "Dragon Age: Redemption" that's slated to start in July and stars Felicia Day.

This fall, the U.S. release of "Gainsbourg" is on tap. In it, Jones plays a cartoonish alter-ego of Serge Gainsbourg, an iconic French pop singer whom Jones likened to Frank Sinatra. He was outfitted with "a ginormous nose and humongous ears" and also sported 10-inch-long finger extensions with which he had to play piano and guitar.

"I kept bumping into everyone and everything," Jones said of his get-up.

Jones will go back to his roots late this year in "Mime Very Own Book," a coffee-table tome featuring 200 pages of Jones spoofing art works and movie posters. He appears shirtless with arms missing in one shot titled the "Venus de Mimelo"; in another, he poses as Jack Nicholson in the scene from "The Shining" where he's coming through the door, only it's retitled here as "The Miming."

The book, which he said is filled with hilarious imagery and loads of costuming, is due out in December from Medallion Press.

Then there's a looming date with a creature named Frankie.

For Doug Jones, that'll be just another day, another face. He's tried on so many now it's almost old hat.